


Despite Everything, It's Still Just You

by High_Spanxicutioner



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: In which a woman reflects on her life, Random musings to celebrate the tenth anniversary, Scars, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27112963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/High_Spanxicutioner/pseuds/High_Spanxicutioner
Summary: A woman stands in front of a mirror, and reflects on her scars.Or, a meditation on the nature of change as applied to the individual and catalysed by trauma.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Despite Everything, It's Still Just You

**Author's Note:**

> A rambling, unfocused drabble to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Fallout: New Vegas, featuring Courier Six and her scars. 
> 
> Celebrate the anniversary right, and go play it again, my Johnny.
> 
> (I know the quote isn't from New Vegas, but shhhh, it fit)

A woman stands in front of a grimy mirror in the formerly swanky high roller suite of an Old World casino, engrossed in her reflection.  
It's changed, after all. Not just from the recent burst of activity in the Vegas region, though god knows that's left more than one mark on her, but from the advancing passage of time and the weathering of a life lived hard. Scars, grime, wrinkles, the kind of haggard overlay that creeps onto every wastelander's face after long enough...

A woman stands in front of a mirror, and she lifts her hand to trace fingertips over the jagged scar of a rushed surgery. One performed without consent, one that took something once thought essential and left her to pick up the pieces without it. Every once in a while she still feels the phantom weight of metal and circuitry inside her head, hears the buzzing of computers or the snide voice of mechanised speakers translating alien thoughts from a familiar source, and she grimaces. More scars from that same incident litter her body, both from the surgeries and from the attacks she sustained afterwards- living memories, proof positive she survived.

Near some of those surgery scars, her fingers find the faded mark of a bullet hole well patched up. The man who pulled her back from that is someone she'll never be able to repay, and the man who put her there has already paid with his life.  
Should he have, she wonders? She'd had the chance to talk to him, saw the full picture behind her unlucky job, and she can't say for sure how she would have acted in his place. She may have chosen a different path to him, rejected the powers trying to pull strings at the expense of the people of the Mojave, but her hands aren't clean; triggers pulled, lives taken, in the name of her ideological goal. 

The next scars absently traced are less defined, memories of something more vicious and sustained than a simple incision or swift gunshot. Discolouration, just-about-healed chemical damage from a malicious cloud of gas seeping into every pore around it. She still wheezes when it rains, still has to stop and catch her breath after running, still panics at the sound of radio static. It's not something she'll ever forget, even in the nights she desperately wishes that she could for the sake of slumber.

Most scars, though, don't come from dramatic events of lingering importance. Who can say where this particular bullet graze came from? Who pulled the trigger, and what became of them?  
What does it say about her, that she can't remember? A life she may have taken, even in self defence, reduced to a single drop of red contributing to the sea staining her hands?

Her lips twist down into a scowl, and she moves on, pulling her focus back to survey her face as a whole.   
All together, do these disparate parts, these changes made to the starting canvas, make up someone different? Who is she, under the scars and the weathered clothes and the silver tongue? Is she still the same person she was when she first accepted a job carrying a gambling chip? What of the person she was when she first set off to become a Courier, or before then?

She's heard it said that war never changes, this woman, and in this moment of melancholy reflection she considers how it earned that luxury. War never changes, perhaps because it forces that change onto others.   
Whoever she is now, she knows what jobs need doing. People need helping, communities need building, and there'll always be jobs for a Courier. Perhaps, if she's lucky, she can bear these scars so fewer people have to- fight the war to try and shield others from it. Maybe it's beyond her ability to change in the grand scheme of things, but there are ways she can affect the here and now.

A woman stands in front of a mirror, and her musings are interrupted by the call of her companion, reminding her of the work that still needs doing. A woman stands in front of a mirror, and nods to her reflection, moving away only to grab the necessary tools of survival in the Mojave.

She may not know who she is, after everything, but she knows it's still her. Luck be damned, she'll make that enough.


End file.
